Portable radiation detection equipment—meant to be conveniently worn or carried by a user—is frequently subject to an inherent tradeoff between capability and size. Current off-the-shelf devices may be limited in terms of the on-board processing power available and/or the sensitivity of the active radiation sensing element. Typically, detection in such devices is based on the number of counts received over a wide range of gamma ray energies and the algorithms used to process this integrated count data are relatively simple.
Some newer portable radiation detectors now may provide full spectroscopic capability and this may require greater complexity in the signal processing requirements. There are several devices currently available that may process the full spectrum (up to roughly 3000 keV) to allow for the identification of standard radioisotopes based on spectroscopic signatures. That is a significant operational improvement.
The next generation of detectors is expected also to provide for the integration of data from multiple independent detectors for improved overall performance. Even more than with the processing of the spectroscopic data from a single detector, the integration of raw data across multiple detectors may require significant processing capability. Typically, the necessary probabilistic fusion algorithms could exhaust the computational capacity of modern laptop computing platforms, much less the processing capability available in a hand-held or belt-mounted radiation detector.